


Stolen Moments

by FadesInTheSun



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Crystal Tokyo Era, F/M, Sailor Moon Crystal, Silver Millennium Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-18 02:36:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11864865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FadesInTheSun/pseuds/FadesInTheSun
Summary: In the Silver Millennium, Venus and Kunzite find that a conspiracy of their friends has given them an afternoon to themselves. In their lives after, Venus finds those hours returning to her again and again.





	Stolen Moments

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to metym, whose art "Endless Bliss" (found below by permission) and idea formed the basis for this story. Thank you to the organizers of the Senshi & Shitennou Reverse Mini Bang 2017, who were immensely kind when my real life revealed itself as the latest incarnation of Chaos and consumed my July and most of my August. Thank you to smokingbomber, who doubled as beta-reader and as ruthless annihilator of technical problems.

_Late in a pleasant morning in the Golden Kingdom_  


 

"Jupiter.  Why exactly do I need to be here?"

Her sister-soldier, her fellow princess, one of her oldest friends, turned a bright, warm smile on her and kept holding open the gate in the garden wall.  Venus suspected a trap.

"You're the one who likes gardens," she accused.  Pointed out, at least.  No, definitely accused, she decided, and shifted her position into an intimidating lean.  Sadly, Jupiter remained several inches taller than her and therefore intolerably difficult to lean over.  "Even if this is an important garden thing, I'm not the one who should be dealing with it.  We have schedules to keep."

"It's all right," Jupiter reassured her.  "Mars and I will make sure everything gets taken care of."

Venus narrowed her eyes and planted her heels.  Not easy to do on a gravel pathway.  "You and Mars?  What's Mercury doing?  She's the one who _wanted_ today free."

Jupiter blinked at her, giving her best guileless look.  Given that Jupiter didn't usually come closer to guile than standing next to a dictionary, it was admittedly pretty good.  "I'm sure she knows what she's doing.  Why don't you go inside?"

Venus glanced one way and another, making sure no Earthers were in line of sight to witness, before she let herself fold her arms and make a distinctly non-court-approved indignant noise at Jupiter.  "You're not going to leave me alone until I go through with whatever this stupid thing is, are you."

Green eyes brightened further with that warm smile's widening.  "Nope."

Flinging her hands in the air did no actual good whatsoever, but did make her feel a little better.  "Fine.  Fine!   _Be_ mysterious.  This is Mars's fault, isn't it?  Tell her I'm going to be seeing her the _second_ I get back, and she'd better have a _really good_ explanation."

She stalked through the gate and into the garden, and its infuriating sunlit air and drifting floral scents and heartbreakingly beautiful flowers.  Earth gardens just _came_ beautiful, as far as she could tell.  They didn't seem to have to work at it.  Even stray meadows in the wild did.  Maybe all the gardeners the palaces and villas and everything hired were just there for decoration.

Her explanation was waiting two turns of the path away, turned to examine one of the plants, his back guarded only by the fabric of his cape.  Venus made a mental note not to yell at psychics out loud anymore.  Just in case Mars actually had heard her in a vision.

She was sure he heard her footsteps, but he didn't turn.  Ignoring her?  Being polite?  It was hard to tell what Earth considered polite in the first place; it changed so much from place to place.  She decided to settle on polite, and stopped a conversational distance away.  "Kunzite," she said.  "I'm here to inform you that one of Earth's elite four appears to be under the influence of outside ... influences."

"Really?"  He considered two of the roses under study more closely, then reached out to break the stem of one.  Still not looking at her.  Still very carefully not looking at her.  "Which one, and what gives you that idea?"

"You're not frowning. _Obviously_ something's wrong."

The corners of his eyes tightened; the corners of his mouth followed, tugging upward against the force of his habit. "Ah. I can confirm extraplanetary influence in that matter." He stripped thorns from the stem, one after another, enough to make holding it more comfortable and less of a risk.  "Also conspiracy from among my own men."

Conspiracy?  They were _all_ in on it?  No, wait, not all; Kunzite didn't look any happier about having had this meeting arranged for him than she did.  Except for the trying not to smile at her part, but that was different.  Liking the result didn't have to mean liking the method.

Still ... if Jupiter really were staying with Mars and Princess Serenity, she didn't have to be back for hours.  And it was a pretty day, even by Earth's standards...

Venus drew a breath, then let it out in a melodic sigh.  His men.  He'd been talking about his men.  "Betrayal from within. I told the Princess that Earth's tendency to factionalize and fragment would be the death of all of us."

"Ah, no. It's Earth's unity that's doomed us today." He turned his head just the slightest bit, just enough for those silver-gray eyes to flicker back toward her.  To take her in.  To admit to himself, maybe, that she was really there.  "They insist on the unthinkable for both of us. A day in which, I'm instructed, neither of us is permitted to work."

Her laugh was a strictly involuntary thing, pure reflex.  She tried to imagine Kunzite not working for a day.  Then she tried to imagine Kunzite not working for six hours.  She was pretty sure he didn't even sleep for that long at a stretch, just in case something came up in the mean time.  "You could _try_ to come up with a halfway convincing story, you know.  Did Jupiter make that one up?  Don't encourage her like that.  No, wait, do encourage her, but tell her to tell me first next time.  We could publish novels on the side."

"Not Jupiter. My understanding is that it's closer to Mercury's fault."

Mercury?  Mysteriously missing Mercury?  That made sense.  She didn't have to admit that, though.  "You're making that one up."

"Not in the slightest," Kunzite assured her.  "She and Zoisite were playing games with numbers one day, and discovered that they could make our birthdays come out to coincide."

'Birthday' being more or less an approximation designed around calendar conventions, granted. Earth might have its frenetic spin that more or less matched to the Silver Millennium's standardized activity cycle, but Venus's homeworld had a reasonable day length a little longer than its actual year. The entire topic of natural day-night rhythms on the fast worlds usually made her head hurt.  Therefore Venus arched eyebrows at him in one of her displays of weaponized skepticism. "Today?"

"Something like two centuries from now, your calendar," he answered her.  "Mercury was, of course, distraught over the delay --"  Since the event would occur sometime after any of Kunzite's hypothetical grandchildren were dead, not to mention great-great-great-grandchildren.  Earthers died so fast.  "And therefore the pair of them appealed to Nephrite, who dutifully," or bribedly, "divined for them the day in the near future that would be plagued by the least trouble."

Venus groaned softly.  "And they got Mars to help with the prediction?"

"And they and Zoisite started identifying and dealing with the possible incidents," Kunzite confirmed.  "Mars and Jadeite are with your Princess and my Prince; Jupiter will be joining Mars shortly; and Nephrite will join Jadeite whenever he wakes up from staying up too late looking for any last-minute surprises.

"In short," and he turned toward her at last, the flower extended in a hand, "they conspired to give us a little time."

She let the remaining thorns score his skin lightly here and there when she took it.  Just for an excuse to keep his hand in hers.  For some reason, he didn't complain at all.

 

  
\-----

_The Silver Millennium, at the Fall_

 

Venus drew a breath of smoke and copper, and tipped her head back to look for a moment at the quiet blue-green gem that hung in the Moon's dark and silent sky.  She needed the sight of it, just for a moment.  Needed some reminder that this was worth something, that that one precious world of sun-touched seas and clouds, of breathable atmosphere, of open skies rather than crystal domes, still had a value and a life that would outlast this day.  That in the centuries and millennia to come, this moment of war would be one day be set to rest, be forgotten.

For a moment, she thought that she must have been turned around in the last fight.  The Earth wasn't where she thought it should have been.  But the sun itself -- the sun was in the right place.  She looked again, and saw only darkness.

Then the darkness moved.

It wasn't _light_ , exactly, that emanated from beneath the writhing blackness that cloaked the Moon's nearest neighbor.  It acted a little like light:  it gave color, it shed the semblance of volume and texture into the clouds of soot around it.  But it showed nothing.  It did nothing to lift the heart.

It covered -- everything.  The whole planet.

 _What's the matter, princess?_ it seemed to whisper to her.   _You wanted Earth to be unified.  Now it is.  Don't you appreciate your present?_

"That's not unity," she muttered.  "That's desecration."

_And yet still a gift to you.  You told the Princess that Earth's tendency to factionalize and fragment would be the death of all of you.  Haven't I made your words true?  Haven't I given you that gift?_

Her throat locked, leaving her for a moment wordless.  She'd told one person on Earth that.

_Don't fret, little princess.  I'll give you him, too._

"You will never give me anything."  The first two syllables she only mouthed, voiceless.  But willing herself to go through the motions of speaking began to unlock the ability to speak.  "I will never yield to you."

The thing whispering in her head only laughed.   _Do you think I need your permission?  I've sent him to you already.  The best of gifts, for all your scorn and anger and pride._

She couldn't tear her eyes away from the dying world overhead.  But, in the same way she'd forced her voice to return, she made herself move:  lunged blindly ahead and to one side, leaping over the fallen pillar she remembered being there, skipping two steps and feeling a heel catch against a piece of broken stone and using that to come down hard into a turn.  Tearing her field of vision away from the Earth.

Splinters of rock pattered against the column where it lay on its side.  That was the only sound Kunzite's attack made; the cratering where the blast struck, where she'd been standing, happened in silence.

The same not-light that shone in the killing clouds lingered in his eyes, casting them from silver-grey to red.

It wasn't fair, was all she could think for a moment.  It wasn't fair.  Yes, Serenity's clinging to Endymion was a forbidden affair, cursed, doomed -- but it shouldn't have doomed a world.  Much less maybe two.  And even if it came for them in the end -- they should have had more time.  


 

\-----

_Early on a pleasant afternoon in the Golden Kingdom_

  


She stretched comfortably in the dappled sunlight, leaned back against Kunzite's shoulder and chest. Mostly in the sunlight, anyhow. He'd settled himself as usual in the shadiest part of the bower, which left her left side mostly in the shade, too.  Shade had an irritating habit of being cool instead of warm, but his body heat was enough to make up for that.  With his own right arm around her, and his other hand running fingers through locks of her hair that weren't trapped between them -- yes. More than enough. 

It was still dim, though.  She watched the orange lilies on the far side of the path, their bright spiky splashes of color and their reddish hearts, and she envied them a little of the intensity of their color. They had just a little more of Earth's madly abundant light than she did. Just a little more of that immense unroofed sky, no barrier at all between themselves and the emptiness between the worlds but air.

"This isn't the kind of place I expected you to have," she said aloud. "When you're not on duty," not that he was ever really off duty, no more than she was, "you're usually all ... lurking. Dark corners. Shrouded behind hangings where you can hear everything without being seen. Balconies where you can see everything without being seen. I didn't think you'd be comfortable somewhere this open."

He let out an almost-silent breath that might have passed for laughter's shadow.  "It isn't mine.  This --" He lifted his hand from her arm to gesture outward at the garden.  "This belongs to Zoisite's family.  Volunteered for the occasion."

"Oh?  That explains why it isn't allergic to sunlight."  She elbowed him a little, just for the sake of feeling him shift and sit upright behind her.  "Unlike some people around here."

"I am not allergic to sunlight." He slid his arm under hers and around her waist, in silent encouragement to stay in one place while he kissed her hair.  "Sunlight's only ... mm. Strong-willed. It insists on glorying in the surfaces of things, in painting them in exquisite detail, without ever exploring or even considering their depths. And therefore, for all that poets paint the sun as the guardian of truth, it makes itself unwittingly at least as much a deceiver."

Venus turned that over for a moment, and turned her head at the same time, tucking her nose just under his jaw.  Her own laugh, when it came, was sharper and louder, ruffling his hair without a hint of shame.  "Are you actually telling me," she said, "that you don't like the sun because it _reminds you of what annoys you about your prince?_ "  


 

\-----

_Tokyo, on a terrible night._

  


There was no sun, not at this late an hour.  The moon shone full, but that was no longer a reassurance.  Only a reminder of how terribly things had gone wrong, before.  The skull's-grin promise of what might happen to the living world around her if she failed.

She'd heard his voice tonight.  For the first time outside of her dreams, she'd heard his voice.  As hollow and dead as the barren Moon.

Tokyo Tower guided her as she ran, at least, golden-warm against the darkness as her memory of a certain afternoon.  She held the glow as a talisman.

Until its light went out.  And all the others:  electric lights in the windows, headlights on cars, the living lights of the people on either side as they dropped to the ground.  She didn't dare stop to see if any of them were breathing.  It would only get worse.

If she tipped back her head, she could see the faint glow of his magic.  A tainted green against the clean, sudden brilliance of the stars.  That ... that was his mistake, she thought.  He could put out those smaller, human lights.  They could put out the entire Earth.  But the stars were past his power, and past the power of the thing that held him.  Even if the man who once read them had fallen, the stars could still give her hope.  After all, from Earth's perspective, Venus was their herald at dusk and dawn.

She smiled, tight and driven, and took in her hand a living fragment of the dead Moon's works, and called up her own light against him.  


 

\-----

_Not quite so early on a pleasant afternoon in the Golden Kingdom_

  


She was decidedly smug that he couldn't actually evict her from the shade over that crack about his prince.  Or over the next several.  It wasn't that he couldn't take offense; of course he could do that much.  She was fairly sure Kunzite could find a reason to take offense over the color of someone's hair ribbon if he really wanted to.  It was that, even with her nearly doubled against his side in a fit of giggles, he couldn't be sure he could succeed at evicting her without her starting a lightshow that would outdo the local fireworks displays. (The local sad excuse for a fireworks display, she amended, having seen a couple on Mars.) And fireworks would get the attention of anyone and everyone in the area exactly where he didn't want their attention to be.  Namely, on her being on Earth's soil in the first place, much less with him.

What he did do, once she'd stopped laughing enough to sit upright unassisted again, was extricate himself from behind her and pace out into the sunlight.

She might have taken it as a rejection or a dismissal, or been miffed about it herself, when she first met him.  Now ... now she saw the way he couldn't actually turn his back on her entirely.  Not just keeping her in his peripheral vision, the way he would any other threat.  His eyes kept flickering back to her.  Bright little glints of silvery gray.

So she reached for the rose he'd given her, and reached up to tuck it deliberately into the bow in her hair.  Red against red.  Low contrast.  She watched his mouth twitch; he always tried not to smile, even if he knew already that he wasn't going to win that battle.

More importantly, _she_ knew he wasn't going to win this one.

She tipped her chin up, letting her eyelashes flutter just the tiniest bit.  "It looks like you're right," she said, putting a little hint of a sigh into your voice.  "Not allergic.  At least, you don't seem to be catching on fire."

"I do not catch on fire."  He folded his arms more firmly, then spoiled the effect by glancing back at her again.

She repeated the eyelash-flutter.  "And you're right. Painted in exquisite denial."

"Detail," he said automatically, then paused and turned his head enough to frown at her openly.  "You did that one on purpose."

Chin tipped up further, till she strained both the back of her neck from the pose of innocence, and her forehead from trying to stay that wide-eyed.  "Detail," she said lightly.  "Whatever.  What else was it?  Glorying in the surfaces of things?"  She paused to look him over deliberately:  the pale shadows against the white of his uniform, the gleaming silver sweep of his hair, the way the light painted the lining of his cape as something richer and warmer than she was used to thinking of brown as being.  "Well.  Maybe.  Are you trying to deceive me right now, Kunzite?  Trying to lull one of the Moon's guardians into a trap with your pretty, pretty eyes and your lifelong skills at scowling?"

"We're off duty," he pointed out.  "So not right now."

She lifted a fingertip to her lips.  "Mm.  You don't look off-duty to me.  That's still your uniform."

He turned back to face her, letting his eyes travel over her in turn.  She appreciated that he only lingered on her legs long enough to be a compliment, not long enough to suggest he'd forgotten where her face was.  "That seems to be yours, too."

"No changing the subject," she told him.  Then stretched in place and slid up to her feet, stepping closer.  "After all.  I'm the one who didn't know today was happening.  Or did they lure you out here first and then abandon you?"

Kunzite held out a hand toward her.  "I assure you," he said, "my men know better than to kidnap me."  Which didn't help his situation in the conversation any; a moment was all the consideration he needed to opt for a retreat.  "No, you're right.  It never occurred to me to wear anything else."

"Are you telling me that I managed to dress up more than you for a date I didn't even know was going to happen?"

"That's _still_ your uniform," Kunzite repeated, mouth and voice solemn, eyes holding a hint of laughter.  "I can't help it if yours looks better on you than mine does on me."

Her eyes gleamed in answer, and she let her uniform slip away.  Not the physical way; Earth had all sorts of taboos regarding showing skin in places that could be regarded as public, and Kunzite was, no matter how pale his hair, very definitely from Earth.  She just let it fade back to the dress she'd been wearing.  Golden, instead of white and orange and blue; her hair ribbon golden, too, a much better contrast for his rose.  A skirt that fell around her ankles rather than her thighs.  Fabric that clasped her body more elegantly without ever sliding either entirely into or quite entirely out of court formality ...

It didn't hurt that her dress left her arms and shoulders and most of her back completely bare.  Technically all of those things were allowable by the current local fashions.  It wasn't her fault if they didn't normally do them all at once.

She took his hand demurely while he was still searching for words.

"Is that what you prefer to wear on dates?" were the ones he eventually found.

Her lips curled upward.  "On this one.  Is that what you prefer to wear on dates?"

He drew a breath, and bowed over her hand.  The kiss he dropped on the back of it was almost more breath than actual contact.  "On this one," he agreed.  "It would have been disrespectful to you to wear anything else."

She arched her eyebrows and drew herself up haughtily, but without retrieving her fingers from his.  "Disrespectful?  To wear something you actually chose for the occasion, instead of -- out of -- by default?"

He touched her cheek with his free hand.  Contact as warm as the kiss.  "To lie to you," he said quietly.  "You already know who I am."

  


\-----

_Tokyo, still on a terrible night._

  


She gained the roof of the main observation deck, and tilted her head back to stare upward at the twisted glow that occluded a handful of stars.  Not too far back.  He hadn't set himself to watch from above the platform itself.  Far enough away that it would take a great deal of careful effort to leap in an arc to reach him, and if she did, he'd have more than enough time to dodge.  There'd be no tackling him hand-to-hand, then.

Far enough away he wasn't clearly visible.  The pale sweep of his cape, lacking its proper Earthly lining. Dark boots against it.  She could imagine the arms crossed, impatient and --

No.  His head was bowed.

Was he _napping_?

Her fists tightened at her sides, but she didn't let him bait her.  Wouldn't.  This wasn't a fight against him, she reminded herself.  This was a fight against what had taken him.  She needed to keep her distance, to keep herself steady.  Not to let the weight of everything at risk sway her.

"I'm here, Kunzite!"

Hear your name, she willed him.  Hear your name in my voice.  Notice that it's familiar, and wonder why. Even if it's not familiar... notice that I know it.  That I know you.  That I recognize you.  And just for an instant, wonder why.

Give me even three seconds' worth of doubt, and I can win you free of this.  I _know_ it.

He lifted his head at her call, but he made no sound in return.  Her heart tried to leap into her throat; she tightened her fists a little harder, letting the tension in her arms cage it.  There was a difference between hoping and letting the hope control her.

Three seconds, and he spoke, and now she forced that same tension to keep her heart from sinking.  "You're late, Princess.  Where is the Legendary Silver Crystal?"

At least that much had worked.  At least he believed the lie.  Even if she lost everything else here, she'd keep what mattered most safe.  It made it almost a win-win situation, come to think of it:  if he'd known her, she'd have gotten him free.  If he hadn't -- well, he didn't.  And that meant she pulled her false authority around her, and lifted her chin with a fierce defiance, and with all the anger she felt at the lies that lay between them.  "I won't give it to you!  Put the city back to normal!"

The wind caught her hair in exactly the way it didn't catch his, secure as he was inside his bubble.  She liked that.  It gave her performance a little something extra, she thought.  A reminder that the whole world stood with her against the thing that held him.

His first words were lower, inaudible at that distance, however she strained.  Another flicker of hope.  Then he drew himself up, threatening.  "Then I'll take it from you by force."

That hope flared brighter in her, sudden and sharp; she closed her hand around it and called it into physical reality, making it sharper still.  "Crescent Boomerang!" she sang out as she flung it toward him.

He gathered power, just as she'd expected; faster than she'd guessed, and the speed made her breath catch in her throat as he knocked the missile away, but her heart was still singing.  Another blast of toxic green followed the first.  She barely had time to brace against it.  Even so, it knocked her almost to the edge of the platform, one of her heels only a few centimeters from empty space.

She fought for her breath, staring up at him, and he only smiled.  "You can't protect anything," he told her, his voice conveying for an instant a parody of intimacy before it turned to scorn.  "Not the Silver Millennium, then.  Not the Earth now."

She knew who he was trying to convince.  It wasn't her.

If he'd been fighting her with a whole heart, he wouldn't have stopped to threaten her.  He wouldn't have let her strike first.  He wouldn't have given her a chance to recover herself.

She searched for words, there in the darkness, on the edge of everything.  And out of all the lies she was spinning to mask the Princess, she came up only with the honesty that the Princess would have used.  "Please don't do this, Kunzite. Your true self is --"

_Your true self is Kunzite.  This isn't you.  This is that thing._

She saw the startlement in him.  Even at that distance, she saw the instant of dismay before his features settled, before his attention lifted to something else she couldn't hear or see.  Before the cruel smile came, and the dismissive toss of his head.

And then the glow of the place redoubled, even against the power he was gathering, and the green of the power that rose behind her against him was bright and living and true.  She couldn't let herself wonder if Jupiter's garden-color would have helped to draw him back, if she'd been able to win just a second or two longer.  The real Princess was here, and at risk, and that mattered more than anything.

But she'd had him, just for that moment.  She'd _had_ him.

She just couldn't hold on for enough _time_.

  


\-----

_The middle of a pleasant afternoon in the Golden Kingdom_

  


Sitting on the ground was probably doing something terrible to the white of Kunzite's uniform.  But Venus was curled even closer against him this time, practically in his lap, and for some reason he wasn't complaining in the slightest.  Except when she nuzzled in in a way that pushed the rose in her hair into his nose, anyway.  But she hadn't done that in at least a minute and a half.

She reached out idly and hooked the stem of one of the orange lilies she'd looked at earlier.  "Do these have a name?"

"Daylily," Kunzite said, without needing to glance at it.  "For how long the flowers last."

Venus shifted against him, trying to pretend that idea didn't upset her, or at least that if it did it had nothing to do with anything but the plant.  "That doesn't seem fair."

He laid a hand over the back of hers, then ran his fingertips along the stem, making each of the secondary growths along it twitch a little. Oranges and greens, all of them.  "It'll die tonight, and another one open in the morning.  That's why they have so many."

"Still.  How does it get any chance to make baby flowers?  How long did it take to get this many of them to grow, if the flowers are there-and-gone like that?"

He didn't make any sound for a moment, but she could feel the shift in his body, and knew it for the silent laugh it was.  "If you ask the gardeners," he says, "overnight.  Then again, if you ask the gardeners, its name is 'that damned thing.'  It just grows, apparently.  Anywhere it wants to, no matter how they try to uproot it.  It came in as a weed ages ago.  They tried to get rid of it for years, till Zoisite decided he liked it and started throwing fits anytime someone suggested clearing out this bed.  Now they just clear the new ones out from the flowers around, and swear at them a lot."

Venus let go of the stem and watched the plant spring back up, then scowled at it herself.  She felt obscurely attacked, somehow, and couldn't figure out whether it was by Kunzite or by the plant.  Probably by the plant.  It was probably winning.  And she couldn't even cut it down politely.  Or ask Kunzite to put one in her hair, if it was going to die that fast.

She still had the rose, anyhow.

"What would you do," she asked, "if you only had one day left?"

He grew still for a moment.  The answer that came a moment later was the one she expected.  "My duty.  You know that."

But his hand folded over hers again, and his other hand found her waist, and even if he must have found himself breathing petals or ribbon again, he didn't complain.  


 

\-----

_Surrounded by ice, on a day when days cease to matter_

  


She stood with her sister-soldiers on the border of the darkness, at the space where the cavern shifted from the passage to the outside world to the beginning of the Dark Kingdom.  Everything in her hurt from the battering they'd taken.  That didn't matter.  What mattered was watching the four figures in pale uniforms strewn across the stone before them.  Seeing them drag themselves up by their fingers.  Waiting to see if they'd answer with another attack --

No.  Not this time.  Even in the darkness, some things made themselves clear.  The way Kunzite held his head, the way his shoulders tightened and drew in on themselves in shame.  The way he held perfectly still as Endymion's other knights pieced together their shattered memories, and came to understand what had happened to them.

The way he lifted his head at last, and his eyes held grief, and sorrow, and all his stricken heart, and what felt like half of hers.

Where the others spoke of Endymion, and of the curse that had bound him, he only whispered her name.

She had all of a second to answer with his, before she lost him again.  But the joy that she felt for that second -- not even the demon that killed him could take that away, not all of it.

When she'd heard his voice first, it had been as dead as the Moon.  They'd won the Moon back.  She'd won _him_ back.

There was no time to follow that thought now, not with Usagi still fighting alone.  But she set it aside in her heart, and cherished the way it strengthened her resolve.  


 

\-----

_Late on a pleasant afternoon in the Golden Kingdom_

  


Shadows lengthened as the planet turned its face away from the sun, but the sun itself was still bright in its sky.  Still warm, no matter how much of Earth's odd air, clear and breathable, it had to reach through.  Still golden.  More golden than earlier, and steadily growing more golden still.

If she hadn't gotten dirt on her dress, she'd look absolutely magnificent in that warm light, Venus was sure.  Oh, well.  Kunzite didn't seem to mind the smudges.

Kunzite's uniform didn't have even one.  She should look into who snuck the Earth Court that particular bit of magic, sometime.  Later.  When she wasn't benefiting from it herself.

There would be even more smudges when she sat up, she was sure, but her arm was cold against the soil even with Kunzite's cape to lie on, and her side was threatening to cramp.  Kissing really was better on beds, or cushions, not on the ground.  She gave a heavy little sigh and squirmed clear, propping herself up on her knees and reaching to rub at her shoulder.

No questions from Kunzite.  Not even a protest.  He only rolled onto his side and took her hand in his yet one more time today, warming her fingers, then reaching up further to work gently at her forearm.

"I thought you weren't the empath," she said to him.

"That's my prince," he agreed.  "I only watch for reactions.  You've been wincing every time you shifted for the last ten minutes."

"And you didn't make me sit up earlier?  You're awful."

He leaned to kiss her fingertips.  "You knew that."

Of everything they'd done today, Venus was infuriated that that was what made her blush.  Twice over when he actually smiled up at her.  Except --

Except that he looked so relaxed, when he did that.  As if he were actually acquainted with the concept of sleep existing, instead of just ... absorbing energy out of sitting up with books and reports and maps, or something.

As if he really _might_ be off duty.  As if 'off duty' were something that really existed for either of them.

"What would you do, if --"

She halted there, appalled at the question making its way even partway out of her mouth.  Almost nothing actually appalled her, not like that.  But that one ... that one was unthinkable.  If he'd asked it of her, she'd have stalked out on the spot.  She couldn't ask it of him.  They were too much alike.  He'd walk out, and she wanted ...

She wanted the time they'd been given.  She wanted every second of it.  Every third, even.  She didn't want to give it up for _that_.

"If what?" he prodded gently.

She wanted to lie.  The sun was on them, she argued to herself.  If the sun was on them, that was permission from him to lie, wasn't it?  He'd _said_.

But she was already saying it.  "If you didn't have to guard your prince?  If you didn't have any duty to attend to?"  And then, to try to salvage something before everything came apart, "If neither of us did?"

His hand tightened on hers.  He said nothing, and that warmth left his face.  Tension stayed behind, nevermind that it hadn't been there a moment ago; somehow it was staying there, not being new.

She drew a breath through her teeth.  "That's why I stopped asking," she said quickly.  "Because it'd just cause trouble.  And this is hard enough, sometimes.  I don't want to burn any britches with you."

The strangled sound he made confused her until he said, with tired patience, "Bridges, Venus.  The phrase is 'burn bridges.'"

She found a wan little smile tugging at her own lips, this time.  "Whatever."

  


\-----

_Surrounded by ice, a year later_

  


She could have done this anywhere.  She could have gone to Tokyo Tower, where she'd fought for him first.  To the streets below it, where she'd heard his voice, or where she'd fought him in a city turned to ice.  To her room, where she'd first woken from dreams of leaning against him on a sunlit afternoon, or from tracing fingers through pale hair while his head rested nearly in her lap, or from flowers that fought with her for brightness.

He wasn't in any of those places.  It shouldn't matter.

It mattered.

The cavern had been frozen over for a long time.  She pretended not to notice the other girls whispering when she went in, heels steadier than they had any right to be on the ice and _still_ a constant threat to her ankles -- never mind.  Never mind.  They looked good, and they were hers, and the ice was going to live with it.

She was stronger than she'd been the first time.  It didn't seem as cold.

The crater where the demon had killed them was easy enough to find; nothing much had collapsed on it.  There were no bodies, no bones.  There never had been.  She knelt on stone that was polite enough not to try to freeze her bare knees to it, and stared at the carved-out hollow in the gray.

"It's not fair," she said aloud.  "You made mistakes.  We made mistakes, too.  Everybody made mistakes.  But the worst anybody else had to do was die for them _once_.  Not twice.  Well, mostly not twice.  And not _worse_ than that, twice.  It's not fair."

The stone, not unreasonably, didn't answer.  Neither did the ice, or the darkness.  The girls hadn't followed her, or were doing a really good job of pretending they hadn't, so that pretty much ran out the list of possible things listening.

Except she couldn't help but feel that someone else was.

Her eyes were doing that thing that they were only ever supposed to do when she told them to.  There was nobody she was trying to sway with glimmering blue right now, so she told them not to.  Her eyes were not as polite as the stone.  She blinked, and rubbed a hand over her cheeks, which only spread the wet and made it achingly colder.

Closing her eyes helped a little.

"I miss you."

It was all true, and it was at least half of the truth.  For an instant she thought she felt something against her cheek; she didn't open her eyes to find out if there were polar bats.

"We're watching out for Endymion for you.  It's not the same thing.  But we -- do what we can.  And I --"

 _I want to see your hair in the sunlight,_ she thought.   _I want to talk with you about our problems and see you turn and look away with that little frown, the one that means something's bothering you, but you can't put a finger on what it is yet, and you don't want to talk about it till you do.  I want to see you look tired when Rei and Usagi start arguing.  I want to see your expression the first time you find out Tuxedo Mask can actually_ hit _things with more than a fist._

_I want to curl up next to you on a couch, and lean against you and close my eyes, and know that somebody's still watching over all the rest of them, and you'll wake me up if something happens that I need to know._

_I want to see you look at me that way again, just once._

_I want to hear you say my name._

Things she'd thought about before, and tried to put aside, over and over.  He was dead.  She had her whole life still to go; she should just get over him, get past all of this.

But she'd never gotten over this crater, not quite.  Not where she'd won him back, and lost him again --

Her eyes flickered open, not staring at stone this time.  Looking at nothing.

She'd lost him here.  But she'd lost him before.

He'd died here.  But they'd _all_ died before.

The thought that she'd tucked away in her heart flared to life, and resolve settled golden around it again, bright as her crescent, solid and sharp as her chain.

Usagi changed the _whole world_ because she wanted her people to live.  All Minako wanted to change was one little part.

She drew a breath, and her voice was steady, all of a sudden, and she heard the other girls' footsteps behind her coming closer as she spoke.  "They gave us something, once.  All of them working together."

Jupiter's hand was there.  Venus took it, and Mercury's on the other, and she knew Mars would be behind her waiting for her to glance back.  She didn't.  This one she meant only to move forward on.

"It's my turn, now," she said to the air, and to her girls, and to a dead man, and for her girls' sake maybe four of them.  "I don't know how we're going to do it.  But somehow.  Someday.  I'm going to give _you_ time.  Every second we should have had.  And more.  


 

\-----

_A pleasant afternoon in Crystal Tokyo_

 

 

It wasn't that she shook off Sailor Venus for the weekend, and picked up being Minako.  It wasn't even that it was really the weekend; they did still have weekends in Crystal Tokyo, mostly because the Queen insisted that she was going to take them, but the Queen shedding her own responsibilities made it more important for Venus to be close at hand, not less.

It was just that for all that her uniform was a second skin, and the Palace was her first home, it was good to have a place that wasn't everyone else's property, too.  Like a child lucky enough to have their own room.  Living in there forever wasn't a goal, but being able to retreat sometimes ...

She laughed to herself, and shook her hair back; smoothed her golden skirt utterly unnecessarily; picked up her pace.  Truth, at least in private:  she'd never have realized she wanted that.  Life wrapped up in her charges and her girls, and to a lesser extent the King's boys, had seemed just about perfect to her to begin with.  He was the one who'd worked out what she was missing and arranged things for her.

Well.  For them.

They'd had to make some changes.  The Palace gardens were broad and low and open for a reason.  They could block a sniper's attack, or dissipate its energy, a lot more easily than they could deal with a single close-range assassin.  So the Palace didn't have the kinds of bowers and nooks and secret little trellis-bounded spots that she wisted after.  And the old gardens were made for a time when the people around them didn't, as a rule, fly.  It made security into a complicated and technological nightmare.

Sometimes she thought about asking him how many years he'd spent doing favors for Mercury to get her to design their private and invisible defenses.  Then she decided he'd made them invisible for a reason, and went right back to taking them for granted on purpose.

Like now, as she came to the gate, and palmed the lock, and stepped inside.

He must have just made it home himself.  He was frowning, of course, examining a hedge where one bush's leaves were starting to brown.  The silver of his hair and white of his uniform stood out sharply against the greens of the garden and the warm fire-colors of the flowers.  (He'd been right about daylilies.  The gardeners, whom she'd learned the hard way were not in fact just decorative, lobbied every couple of years to be allowed to take them out entirely.  Sooner or later they'd figure out they were never going to win.)

She came up behind him.  He didn't turn.  Not because he was ignoring her, not out of politeness ... just because he knew it was her by her footsteps, and knew he didn't have to, and that made his not doing something worth more to her than most people's whole days of doing things.

It also made it a lot easier to wrap arms around his shoulders from behind and try playfully to pull him away from the object of his scrutiny.  "Stop that.  We have people to frown at things for you, remember?"

He resisted, but he let go of the branch and put a hand up over hers, so she counted that as a win.  "Having staff to take care of things doesn't mean I shouldn't keep my hand in."

"Keep your hand in.  Like you actually grew these to start off with, instead of trading with Makoto and Zoi."

He squeezed her hand.  "Some of them."

"I grew some of them."

"You grew a cactus."

She stood on tiptoes and tried to kiss the back of his head.  She got his hair, anyway.  "It counts.  Stop frowning at that and come frown at me."

"Have you done anything I should be frowning at you for?"

That was a challenge.  She tried to pull him backward again; when it didn't work, she tried sitting down on the ground instead.  With her arms still around him.  Neither gravity nor physics liked that arrangement; with a half-strangled "Minako!", they both tumbled together, him dragged down mostly on top of her.

She got herself pushed up into a kneel before he could extricate himself.  That gave her the advantage of position, and she hugged his shoulders and head against her, laughing.

It was so good to have a place where she could laugh without having to measure who was going to see it and what piece of politics they'd think it meant what about.

He gave up trying to scowl at her, and reached up to trail fingers through her hair.  "Taken captive.  How embarrassing."

She tucked her chin down against his forehead.  "And on duty, too."

"Minako," he sighed again.  "You know I'm not."

Her eyes sparkled.  "You don't look off-duty to me."

Despite himself, he smiled again.  "If you let me up, I can do something about that."

She considered letting go of him.  For maybe half a second.  "Nope!  You're stuck.  Better learn to live with it."

His fingers trailed down through the gold of her hair in the sunlight, and came to rest against the back of her hand.  "As long as you'll have me."

She closed her eyes, warmed by the light, by his words, by his presence.  By the jokes they could make, now that their duty was something that bound them together rather than apart.  By the flowers that reminded her to value each day.  By the place he'd made for her, just so that sometimes, once in a while, they could remind each other who they were when they didn't have to be serious; they could relax and laugh and play as if they had all the time in the world.

And why shouldn't they?  They'd beaten death.  Once by their Queen's mother's grace, yes, all right.  Once out of will and out of love, when the darkness had tried to take Earth a second time.  And once when she fought to bring him back for his own sake.  For the heart that had never, never quite forgotten hers.

All the time in the world, she thought, as she dipped further to kiss him between the eyebrows, then on the tip of his nose, then on his mouth to stifle his complaint.  All the time in the world.

And maybe a little bit more.

 


End file.
